Blocks! - More rambling on about blocks and how I think I could get more of them.

I was just sitting down fixing a few bugs and pondering how I could get more out of the art side of things, I don't want to have pixel deformation, it's far too annoying to redesign at this stage, what I need is an actual physics engine in to handle water, debris (Hope I spelled it right) and other things of that nature.

Then I realized I also need to add bits of cave left over, I was planning on having dirt demolish and you see particles fly out and bounce along for the added goodness effect.

Number 1 - What I could do is run it on my particle engine and add physics to the particles, i'm not sure how that would harm performance, suppose I could add in "If collision == true then run it" or compare it to an open space, if the space isn't air then run the collision, cutting out most of the detection that way.

Number 2 - What I also could do is create different graphics and use my water detection I wrote to check the bounds and place different tiles for different situations, if you dig up and there's only tiles to north and west make change those tiles, or have those tiles scan for air, if there's air create said tile, this would mean I would have to hand draw different tile sets for each bit of dirt to give a natural look, compared to a random and let it do all the work.

Number 3 - What I was also thinking is have the tile as a full one, then if it gets dug, break it down, think of asteroids, how they break smaller and smaller, this would make us of a physics engine if I wanted to place one in, or not but it would also mean that a 32x32 tile would break into 4 8x8 then 4x4, maybe not perfect but a random type of amount.

Here's a drawing of what I mean.

And you could also have a mount of dirt too, Maybe just an effect for now.